


Go the Fuck to Sleep

by nerdiekatie



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Caffeine, Fluff, Gen, Platonic Relationships, Shiro is a level 3 adult, Sleep Deprivation, Space Dad Shiro (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 18:18:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10314140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdiekatie/pseuds/nerdiekatie
Summary: He’s glad the paladins only have a low-level telepathic connection. Shiro is one hundred percent sure that if he could everything Pidge is feeling, he would be on his ass. As it is, Shiro has the distinction impression that Pidge can see time and taste shapes right now.





	

**Author's Note:**

> literally just fluff

Shiro insists that all of the paladins get sleep regularly because there’s no telling when the chance will be taken away, or they’ll need to stay awake longer than they expected.

Pidge insists that she can do the missions even without a night of sleep, but Pidge’s latest all-nighter is showing.

Pidge is clearly exhausted. All of them are tired after such a long mission, but Pidge is the most affected. She slumps over her laptop at the kitchen table, yawning. Her typing lacks its usual verve. Pidge is good, but she still has hours of hacking, decryption, and translation ahead of her. Then, they will all have to actually read the intel they managed to gather and hope they do it before the Galra move or increase the defense around potential targets.

“I’m going to need something stronger than caf,” Pidge says, rubbing her eyes under her glasses. Shiro counts the admission as a point in his favor, but he’s more than a little trepidatious to see what Coran and Allura will turn up. Shiro already can’t stand the smell or taste of caf, which was absolutely revolting, stronger than coffee, and green. Pidge, on the other hands, had taken to caf like water.

Coran snaps his fingers. Shiro internally laughs when he sees that Coran’s picked up Lance’s finger guns. He uses them wrong, but it’s close enough.

“We have some korvak. It’s for pilots on extended missions. I don’t know why we haven’t given it to you sooner. It should be in the third cabinet on the right.” Pidge makes a move to stand up and get the korvak, but Hunk stops her.

“I got this,” he points at the cabinet. “You work.” He directs Pidge to her laptop. She buries her face in the screen. Shiro watches Hunk pull out a bottle of pills and set them on the counter. Then, he surprises Shiro by pulling out the caf as well. He scoops out triple serving into an Altean electric kettle with one third serving of water. Hunk turns the boiler on as he grinds about half the pills to a fine powder, dumping those into the boiler. By the time Hunk begins to strain his brew into a mug, the smell is so strong that it turns Shiro’s stomach. Pidge doesn’t seem to notice the smell, and she drinks without looking when Hunk presses the mug into her hand.

Shiro can see the moment Hunk’s concoction hits Pidge. She sits straight up, gasping and clutching at her chest. She looks between the cup and her laptop, uncertain. Shiro sees the _fuck it_ on her face as she takes another sip. By the time she finishes, she’s practically vibrating. Her fingers on her keyboard are flying at an inhuman speed. He thinks he can see them shaking a little as Hunk reluctantly puts another cup in her free hand. Pidge drinks at a steady pace but with the attitude of someone who’s chugging a pint of beer in a single swallow.

Shiro watches in disbelief as Hunk starts to brew a second batch using his first batch as replacement for water. A responsible adult would stay to make sure that isn’t going to go horribly wrong, but Shiro is tired.

He moves over to where Hunk is working at the counter, trying to ignore the smell of the korvak-infused caf.

“You’ll make sure her heart doesn’t give out?” he mutters. Hunk nods.

“Wake me up if there’s a medical emergency,” Shiro says and stalks off to his bunk. He wakes to the gentle lights of the castleship’s early morning, so there must not have been an emergency, medical or otherwise. He trudges to the kitchen. He greeted by the sight of Pidge at the table, sipping something from a mug, Lance seated to her right. He and Hunk probably switched off on Pidge watching duty in the night.

“Is she still going?” Shiro says, looking at Pidge’s wan face. Already the palest paladin, Pidge matches the white on her armor. She’s regressed from literally vibrating to nearly vibrating. Shiro’s sure that’s just her exhaustion straining the effectiveness of Hunk’s brew, rather than the brew loosing effectiveness.

Pidge lets loose a stream of syllables. Shiro makes out consonants and vowels, but none of them are in any order he recognizes. Shiro stops. He isn’t sure if he’s tired and isn’t hearing right, or if Pidge just isn’t making sense.

“Was that English?”

 “I think it’s supposed to be,” says Lance. Lance’s first language isn’t English either, and he looks just as concerned as Shiro, cocking his head and looking very closely at the movement of Pidge’s lips.

Pidge says something else, and it makes as much sense as first statement. Or question? Shiro isn’t sure. He looks at her wide eyes and the lines at their corners and decides it’s time to cut Pidge off.  

He gently detaches her mug from her hand. He brushes his hand over her head to check-in, and, not for the first time, he’s glad the paladins only have a low-level telepathic connection. Shiro is one hundred percent sure that if he could everything Pidge is feeling, he would be on his ass. As it is, Shiro has the distinction impression that Pidge can see time and taste shapes right now.

Pidge makes a noise of protest when he takes her caf away and replaces it by plopping a bag of water in front her. She looks disgusted but picks it up anyway. Her hands are shaking so badly that Lance has to put the straw in her pouch for her.

Eventually, with a great deal of shaky gesticulation, Pidge manages to convey that she’s finished decrypting the data. She transfers the data to each of them so they can all comb through it for relevant information, hopefully before the Galra get proactive. Shiro tries to send her to bed, because they can take if from here, but it soon becomes abundantly clear that she can’t sleep.

This continues for two days of Pidge on korvak-induced hallucinations. She takes to perching on high places like Shiro and Hunk’s shoulders. Attempts to dislodge her result in her clinging tighter. She steals Lance’s jacket and has to be bribed to give it back. She starts to take apart the kettle and cries when Hunk takes it from her. In between all this, she finds the time to code a decryption and translation program.

Hunk says that it, “Looks good, but I’d rather sober Pidge go through it before we use it.”

After forty hours, Pidge returns to recognizable English, even though it’s still garbled. After sixty-six, Shiro realizes that Pidge has disappeared from the common area.

Shiro immediately dispatches the paladins for search and rescue. In Pidge’s state, the castle is dangerous. He heads for the Green Lion’s hangar. He thinks as he goes, composing a list of other places she might be, on the chance that she’s not with her lion.

He doesn’t see her when he steps into the hangar. His heart rate picks up.

“Pidge?” he calls. The Green Lion looks at him, then lifts her head from where it was resting on her crossed paws. He then sees Pidge, her back pressed against her lion, safely guarded by Green’s crossed paws. She’s asleep, her head against her shoulder, her hands limply resting on her lap. Something in Shiro from the long day softens.

Shiro walks toward Green, who accommodatingly moves her paws so Shiro can get through. Pidge is light enough that he plans to pick her up and carry her to her room, but when he goes to lift her, she swings like she’s holding her bayard. Shiro jumps back. Pidge goes back to sleep.

He shouldn’t have tried to move her, he admonishes himself. That was a bad idea anyway. Of course, Pidge would fight someone who tried to move her in her sleep.

Shiro thinks. He could leave her here. The Green Lion won’t let anything happen to her, but Pidge is going to get cold against all this metal. Shiro tries to shake off the sensory memories of falling asleep in a cold cell. He devises a better plan.

He heads back up into the castle when he runs into Hunk.

“Hey, Shiro!” says Hunk.

“Hunk, I need as many spare blankets as you can get. And some pillows,” he adds as an afterthought. Hunk looks puzzled, so he explains, “Pidge fell asleep in the hangar. I want to make her comfortable.”

“Can’t we move her?” Hunk spreads his arms and mimes picking Pidge up.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Shiro says drily.

When Hunk shows back up, he’s got Keith and Lance in tow, and all of them are carrying armfuls of blankets and pillows.

“Hunk said something about blankets?“ Keith asks.

“Come on in, guys, but be quiet,” Shiro says, opening the door to Green’s hangar and beckoning them through. They all move silently to where Pidge is still reclined against Green. Shiro drapes the blanket he has gently around her form, then gestures to Hunk for one of the pillows. Hunk hands it over, and Shiro positions the pillow carefully between her shoulder and her head without waking her up, because that angle would be horrible for her neck. When they’re all done, Pidge is a veritable pile of blankets. Not a single inch of her in uncovered, and she looks like she’s in a nest.

Shiro is a little worried that he’ll need to send someone to get Pidge in the morning, but she shows up to breakfast with a pillow under her arm and a blanket around her shoulders. Her hair is wild, gone from her usual fluff to on end in every direction. Her eyes have lost yesterday’s bloodshot quality, but Hunk still stops her from getting to the caffeine as she passes him.

“You had enough yesterday,” he says, pulling her toward a chair. Hunk took time this morning to make the closest he can get to hot chocolate. He shoves the mug in her hands and fills a plate with food goo for her. Pidge looks mildly irritated at being denied caffeine, but she lets Hunk pat her shoulder before he withdraws to his own plate. She ignores the food, slowly and steadily draining her drink before she leans over and mutters lowly to Shiro,

“Thanks. For the blankets.”

Shiro smiles back. “You’re welcome.”


End file.
